Leah Whittington’s impressive book explores the persistence, asymmetry, and fragility of rituals of supplication from classical antiquity through the Renaissance. Whittington presents supplication as a reciprocal but asymmetric ritual, inherently unstable due to the inevitable individuality of each participant, who under the pressures of a particular situation may react unpredictably to “the paradox of the suppliant’s powerful powerlessness” (18). Drawing on a broad range of texts, Whittington moves fluently across generic, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. Her first chapter, focused primarily on Greek works and drawing on methods from the social sciences as well as literary criticism, lays out the conceptual framework for the remainder of the book. Four further chapters, on Virgil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton, each situate a canonical work or pair of works at the intersections of classical and vernacular intertexts, traditional and contemporary social practices, historical documents, and visual artifacts. A brief review cannot do justice to the richness of each chapter’s interventions; scholars of each author and genre treated, as well as comparatists working across multiple disciplines, will find much to reward their attention to the entire book. Whittington offers persuasive new insights into familiar works and tells a complex story whose principal strands are deeply intertwined.

One strand juxtaposes the persistent potency—or at least potential—of supplication with explorations of its contingency. An excellent chapter on the Aeneid locates Virgil’s poem at a moment of sociopolitical transition, as the act of supplication—shameful in a republic—becomes a potent yet problematic weapon in the new political theater of empire. Whittington shows that Virgil destabilizes the fragile functionality of supplication as represented in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Aeneid’s narrative voice gradually prises open a gap between the narrator’s sympathies and his hero, forcing the reader into the “conflicting moral and emotional positions” (49) that supplication entails. Arguing that even Virgil’s patrons will experience vicariously the humiliation of pleading for the clemency that becomes a hallmark of imperial Romanitas, Whittington extends pessimistic readings of the Aeneid in an intriguing new direction.

The political configurations into which supplication aligns the selves it shapes form a second strand of Whittington’s argument. The political implications of supplication made so clear in the chapter on Virgil become especially prominent in Shakespeare and Milton, as supplication becomes a tool of constraint exercised by the supposedly powerless suppliant on the supposedly all-powerful ruler. Supplication’s potential to collapse as well as impose or acknowledge hierarchy reaches its apex in a compelling reading of Paradise Lost, as Whittington shows Milton’s political—and theological—egalitarianism to be imagined and enacted by rituals of supplication and response. Here Whittington extends both recent feminist readings of Eve and the ongoing recuperation of Milton’s uses of classical literature.

A third strand argues that the psychic fissures of supplication generate new poetic strategies. In the Africa and Canzoniere, Petrarch blurs the boundaries between suppliant’s and respondent’s experiences, enabling him to dramatize the divisions and delusions of the enamored self and so producing his quintessentially Renaissance poetics of interiority. In one of her strongest readings, Whittington argues that Coriolanus single-mindedly drives toward Volumnia’s supplication of Coriolanus in order to explore both the gradual erosion of selfhood and the abrupt and catastrophic “loss of autonomy” (149) that interpellation into predetermined rituals of supplication can inflict on an individual, whether petitioner or recipient. Rendering supplication as tragedy, Coriolanus classicizes its treatment of supplication and its dramatic poetics alike: an argument with important implications for recent scholarship on Greek drama in the English Renaissance. The equality that accepted supplications create is mirrored in subtle linguistic shifts that Whittington traces throughout Paradise Lost.

Whittington’s book, often beautifully written, teems with insights small and large, into the workings of Virgil’s narrative voice or Milton’s use of the classical tradition, into the erosion of agency and individual autonomy that interpellation into a prescribed ritual can produce even as that ritual succeeds in the short term. Throughout, Whittington carefully attends to supplication as a ritual with a literary prehistory and an extratextual reality; she explores her authors’ references to their predecessors and responses to their cultural moments with sensitivity and finesse. Renaissance Suppliants provides substantial new insights into individual canonical works. More important, it explores the ways in which authors have returned to the depiction of a particular ritual to ask how literary interrogations of supplication can yet perpetuate the narratives and affective structures that continue to provide our social and emotional safety nets in moments of crisis.